[Magazine] The Washington Pastime

seaaircarol said:

Just FYI...Mike Vidafar posted on his blog about the website being hacked:

http://mikevidafar.com/category/blog/

Click to expand...

Thanks for that link. I can't imagine how it must feel to have this happen. I was the editor for an online scientific journal, and I was glad we had the resources of the university at our disposal.

I have to say that blog post upset me. He's not contacted me, despite three emails to him, nor has he responded to the other people (at least not in his blog) who commented on the post. Contacting the authors is the first thing I'd do if my journal had gone down with accepted papers in the queue. I don't expect him to be a website wizz (I wasn't for my journal!) but it seems he has nobody knowledgeable working for him. He doesn't seem to be in any hurry to fix the situation other than to set up a PayPal account to take donations. As Uncle Jim said, it's probably no great loss if I move my story on to a different market.

Chris--if I remember correctly, the contact emails are all @washingtonpastime.com. Perhaps Mike isn't able to access the emails if he was hacked? If that's the reason, however, he could say that on the blog. I feel badly for him, but I do think he should be keeping the writers informed.

I'm very sorry about his "crippled dream," but how about his authors? What he needs to do, right now, is send reversion letters to everyone.

Did he really have no off-site backup? No list of authors with title of story/name/address in hardcopy somewhere or on a thumb drive in his desk drawer?

James D. Macdonald said:

What he needs to do, right now, is send reversion letters to everyone.

Click to expand...

Would there be any consequences for sending the story elsewhere without this reversion letter? I've withdrawn the story, but there's been no acknowledgement and I'm not sure what I'm legally able to do next.

ETA: Oh, should I (legally or professional courtesy) tell the next editor that the story was once under contract but never published?

It would be simple courtesy to tell the next editor that the story was accepted by another publication, never published, and withdrawn.

Duotrope is noting this market "may be declared defunct on January 15, 2013."

I'm not sure how they determine that, but there it is.

Got an email from Mike Vidafar today explaining the hacking situation and expressing regret for the withdrawal of my manuscript.

He reports that the publication is back up and running, and accepting submissions.

I replied, thanking him for the well wishes and wishing him the best on the magazine. I'll give it some time and see what shakes out, and if things look good, I might submit a new piece should WP be the right market, keeping in mind there are a lot of right markets out there.

I'm glad he finally told you something, Chris. I noticed that my story is back up, with a nice new picture attached. So...that's nice.

Well, the saga continued. The issue was not resolved in March as I had thought, but we have reached a satisfactory conclusion now. I won't go into details, because this issue was a (hopefully) one-time fluke related to the hacking incident. Future authors will not experience the situation I was in, so there's no need to caution anyone about it.

However, if you aren't in the habit of this already, get in the habit of keeping any correspondence you have with any publisher or agent. I even do this in my job, too. Some email providers have a way for you to save emails to your hard drive, and at 3K per message you can save every email you've ever sent and received in four lifetimes on a 2GB thumb drive. If nothing else, set up folders to sort the emails to store on the server.

(If anyone knows how to download Yahoo emails to my hard drive without having to copy/paste into Word or forward to a gmail account please let me know).

Off my list, then.

CaoPaux said:

When they relaunched, they added a Skip the Slush[SUP]TM[/SUP] reading fee ($10).

Click to expand...

Not to mention the most recent story is from June 25.